1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server apparatus, a data processing method, a program, and a communication method for identifying content data both locally and globally.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has been difficult for applications using audio-visual (AV) material stored in a storage device, such as a non-linear editing application, to quickly and easily determine what AV material is recorded on the storage device and what is the most desired AV material.
When AV material is stored and managed in the form of files in the storage device, a command such as LIST is issued to obtain a list of files stored in the storage device if it uses a standard file system.
However, it is difficult to distinguish AV material, metadata (e.g., extensible markup language (XML) documents), and other data from each other, and those files are recognized as an identical file that stores some binary data.
The application on the file system is implemented by an AV-material database application that can manage the relationship between AV material files, metadata files, and other data files while distinguishing those files from each other. The implementation of such an application is mainly achieved by management data (in the form of files or in the form of an expansion into an internal memory) describing a list of the AV material (files), metadata (files), and other data (files) managed by the application and the relationship therebetween. However, the management data is often specific to the database application, and it is not taken into consideration that external applications, such as the non-linear editing application described above, may use the management data.
A video editing technique of the related art is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-320756.